


Try Again

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: Confessions, Happy Birthday aimee!, Hints of Neji/Tenten, Hints of past Lee/Sakura, M/M, Practice Kissing, angsty fluff, talking about feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-27 02:03:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21384277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: Gaara has a date to the River Daimyo's birthday party, so he asks Lee to help him practice kissing. Lee reluctantly agrees. Neither of them have any ulterior motives about this whatsoever.
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Comments: 32
Kudos: 307





	Try Again

**Author's Note:**

> For aimee, on the auspicious occasion of her birthday! I know you said you liked fluff, and this is slightly more angst than fluff, but I did get the brief on "people finally talk about their feelings" (I hope). I hope you enjoy your roast dinner and playing Death Stranding! :D

“You want me to help you practice kissing?”

Lee’s hands tighten around the edge of his coffee mug. The heat of it seeps through his bandages and tickles at his skin. 

Across the scratched vinyl of Lee’s kitchen table, Gaara licks his thumb. He presses down on the last crumbs of his tea biscuits--the ones Lee only buys when he knows Gaara is going to be in town--and sucks them off. He blinks, slowly, and his eyes narrow, a microexpression that’s a combination of dismay and disbelief--_why won’t you do this for me?_ and _how dare you not do this for me?_ all at once. It’s these tiny twitches of his face that Lee has dedicated years of his life to studying, and now he can read them as fluently as handsigns flashed between the trunks of trees. 

“Yes,” Gaara says, finally, and then pillows his hands atop one another. Gaara has lovely hands, when he chooses to show them. That isn’t often, especially outside of his village. 

Lee remembers the first time Gaara shed the sand armor in his apartment’s doorway. It was almost exactly eight months ago to the day, and Gaara was returning from a particularly fraught day of meetings. The sand rolled off him, as easily as he slipped off his shoes, and shuffled into the gourd that he dropped by the door. And then he fell, boneless with exhaustion, onto Lee’s settee, head draped over the couch’s back. Lee can picture it clearly, because he could see the pulse at the hollow of Gaara’s throat--first jumping in agitation, and then slowing. He watched the rise and fall of Gaara’s chest for too long, because Gaara opened his eyes and caught him staring. In a rare moment of what Lee could only assume was self-consciousness, he summoned the sand back towards himself with a flick of his fingers. Lee wanted to beg him to leave it off, but cowardice stilled his tongue. But the next time Gaara came by, the armor was nowhere to be found. 

Beneath the sand armor, Gaara’s skin is softer than a shinobi’s has any right to be. At least, it looks that way; Lee has never _touched_ it, no matter how often his mind has summoned up near-tactile hallucinations about how it would feel under his palms. Before he saw Gaara’s skin uncovered for the first time (_up close_, without the hazy pain of a Gate coloring his vision), Lee presumed it might be sandstone-pale. But his skin is dark, the same desert brown as his brother’s and sister’s. His hands, too, are soft--uncalloused, with slim pink half-moons under his neatly trimmed fingernails--though often crusted with potting soil. He scrubs them meticulously before he sits at Lee’s kitchen table to eat, like a raccoon washing its paws before a meal: delicate, never wasting so much as a splash of water. 

Gaara stares at him expectantly. He’s wearing what Lee thinks of as his ‘teacher expression’. It’s the same one that crowns his face when he tours the academy--as if, if Lee were to give the correct response, Gaara would cross his arms and nod and say, “Good. Again.” (Lee has seen full-grown chuunin fall to tears at such high praise from the Kazekage.) 

“_Why?_” Lee spits, mouth agog. _Who are you planning to kiss?_ he doesn’t ask, though he wants, desperately (painfully), to know. He chokes down _And why can’t it be me?_ with a mouthful of too-hot coffee. His tongue scalds, and he rubs the sore tastebuds against the flat of his front teeth. 

“Kankuro said it’s traditional.”

Lee splutters. Coffee flecks the tabletop, and Gaara pulls his hands back, upper lip wrinkling. “I don’t know what it’s like in Suna, but I can assure you, it’s _not_ traditional to practice kissing your friends- !”

Gaara purses his lips. He’s wearing a teacher expression again; a different one, this time, one reserved for particularly dim or spectacularly disobedient students. 

“Not the practice,” he corrects. He retrieves his napkin from his lap and mops up Lee’s spit-out coffee with small, efficient dabs. “Kissing. At the end of a date, it’s traditional to kiss.”

Lee’s heart does an uneasy somersault in his chest. 

“You have a date?” His voice doesn’t quite crack at the end, but it’s a near thing. He’s suddenly very, very glad he chose not to partake of Gaara’s biscuits, because he feels like he might be sick. 

Gaara nods. “There’s a ball in two weeks’ time, to celebrate the River Daimyo’s birthday.” He’s not even looking at Lee as he speaks, focused instead on folding his napkin into a tidy square, creasing the edges with his fingernail and tucking it under his saucer. “The Council arranged for the daughter of the leader of Takumi Village to attend as my date.” He pauses for a moment, and his nostrils flare. “It’s political, but they’re hoping it will be a love match … at least on her part.”

The Suna Council has been trying to marry Gaara off for years, each attempt ending in a failure more spectacular than the last. Gaara doesn’t _do_ romance, really, and whatever expectations these various high-ranking women have about the mysterious leader of the Sand Village are quickly dashed when they actually meet him and discover that he has no plans to sweep them off their feet. Most women--especially the high-born civilian women the Council keeps trying to set him up with, who care more about court politics than battle strategy--don’t seem to _get_ Gaara. None of them are willing to spend the time to carefully wear away at the defensive armor that surrounds his heart, to find out what really makes him tick. Lee imagines none of them have so much as made the effort to discover that he prefers his tea lukewarm, but his soup piping hot; that he likes his food with so much salt that it’s almost spicy; that he _does_ sleep, despite the rumors, but he has to wear himself out physically first; that he needs a minimum of an hour to decompress after any event with more than 50 people in attendance. 

And Gaara certainly does little to endear himself to his would-be suitors, either. 

At the Wind Daimyo’s wedding, Lee watched him sit in complete silence with his date, a chieftan’s daughter from one of Wind’s outlying tribes, draped in dark blue silk and tiny, jingling silver bells. She spent the better half of the night trying to engage him in conversation, receiving nothing but nods and grunts in response. He was uncomfortable, Lee knew, in the thronging crowd, as he watched him from across the room (when really he should have been keeping an eye on his charge’s--a wealthy craftsman from Yugakure with a proprietary wool-dyeing method--drink to ensure he wasn’t poisoned). Gaara’s date should have known better than to pressure him to talk. If she truly cared about him, she would have made excuses to escort him out onto the veranda of the Daimyo’s palace for a breath of cold night air and a moment of quiet to collect his thoughts. At least he spoke to her; Lee heard it. She asked him, “Are you having a good time?” and he responded, flatly, “No.” 

“Have you met her?” Lee breathes. His fingers clench tight on his knees. He’ll have bruises tomorrow: a dark, five petaled flower of hematomas around each kneecap. 

Gaara doesn’t answer the question, which Lee knows means, _No._ Instead, he picks up Lee’s coffee press and pours himself another cup of coffee. 

“It’s a strategically advantageous match,” he says, as Lee reaches across the table to add cream to Gaara’s cup before he even asks. Gaara nods when the coffee is the correct shade of hazelnut-pale and starts fanning his hand in brisk movements over the steaming cup to cool it. “It would soothe tensions between Suna and the village, and grant us access to their weapons stores.” 

“Couldn’t you just … negotiate with them instead?” 

There’s a brief upward movement of Gaara’s eyes that superficially resembles a roll. Lee takes advantage of the pause to slide a few more biscuits onto Gaara’s plate. “Not as the Council sees it.” He notices the biscuits, and his eyes flick to Lee’s hands, hesitating on the tabletop. The corner of his upper lip lifts in a shadow of a grateful smile. Lee’s heart clenches, as if Gaara’s fingers had slipped beneath his ribcage and massaged the muscles of his heart. “They’re tired of trying to pair me off. If this doesn’t work out, I’m not sure how many remaining options they have.”

“They should let you decide on your own!” Lee bangs on the table with his fist, and the dishes clatter in agreement. It’s a familiar debate, one they’ve had again and again over the years. Lee has never swayed Gaara to his point of view, but that doesn’t mean he won’t keep trying. “You can’t rush love.” 

Gaara looks up, then, into Lee’s eyes. A strange expression crosses his face by degrees, like the turning of seasons. His mouth softens, and the pale seaglass green of his eyes shimmers in the artificial light of Lee’s kitchen lamp. 

“No, you can’t,” he agrees, and his words are gentle, like one mittened hand slipped into another on a winter’s walk. “But I need to try.” He studies the depths of his coffee cup like it holds all the secrets of the universe, shifting it in circles on its saucer so the cream eddies into brown. “I’ve never done this before.” An admission of lack of experience is a rare thing to fall from Gaara’s lips. Lee wants to pick it up with both hands and guard it as jealously as a treasure. “So, will you?” Gaara pauses, the moment hanging on a knife’s edge. “For me?” 

The knife digs in, slips between Lee’s rib muscles and _twists_.

“Gaara- “ He can hear the pleading note in his own voice, a last-ditch effort, his hand braced against the knife hilt. “- I don’t think that I’m the right … I’m not very experienced.” 

Gaara exhales through his nose. The napkin flutters against the table. He leans forward, expression intent. “You kissed _that girl_, once,” he says, tongue honed and bladed, “the one with the big forehead. You told me.”

Gaara knows full well who Sakura is. He’s being puerile on purpose, brattish for a reason Lee can’t quite put his finger on. 

“Sakura-san has a lovely forehead,” he protests, missing the point utterly and deliberately. 

“And that boy on your team,” Gaara reminds him. 

“That was on a dare!”

Gaara sits back in Lee’s kitchen chair. The rickety wood of the seat creaks under him. He crosses his arms and stares. 

Last summer, at the Star Festival, there was a knife-throwing display. Tenten tugged Lee halfway across the village to stand in the crowd gathered in the central square, watching as a man spun on a wooden wheel, a beautiful girl in multicolored sashes hurling kunai and shuriken at him with pinpoint accuracy--never grazing his skin, but securing his yukata and hakama to the platform with her blades. Tenten gasped and cheered, leaning so far over the crowd control barrier that the announcer almost elbowed her in the face. This is how Lee feels now: pinned and suspended, spinning in place for an audience of one. 

“Surely I’m not the best person to help you with this.” Gaara takes a long, slow sip of his now-cool drink, his eyes not leaving Lee’s. Lee’s cheeks heat under the scrutiny in turn, as if all the steam Gaara waved away from his cup were now flooding his face. “Why- why _me_?” 

And _that_ is the question Lee has been circling this whole conversation. Gaara has a great many friends, both within his village and outside, scattered across the Five Great Shinobi Nations. He’s well-liked--beloved, even--by his people, and respected by his allies. Especially here in Konoha, there are many who consider him a dear friend. And Lee has heard the ways the kunoichi of Suna whisper about his power, has seen how their eyes track him when he walks by. Even if the ladies of the court can’t understand Gaara, there are plenty within the villages who _could_, perhaps even some who _do_. Yet somehow, whenever he visits the village, he always ends up here: seated at Lee’s kitchen table, eating his food and drinking his coffee as the sun goes down; or curled up in Lee’s armchair with a stack of paperwork while the rain falls outside; or perched on Lee’s floor on a cold evening, his thin legs stretched beneath the lotus-printed blanket of his kotatsu. 

Gaara sets his mug down, and something falls behind his eyes: an invisible curtain. An air of sudden diplomacy masks his delicate features. In an instant, he’s all business, as if Lee’s kitchen had transformed into the Council chambers and he were negotiating the finer points of a contract. 

“I consulted several books,” he explains, voice prim and lips tight, “which taught me the basic anatomy but lacked the necessary haptic feedback.” His shoulders stiffen, minutely, beneath the tan leather panels of his jacket. “It would be inappropriate to ask Temari or Kankuro for help. And- ” His upper lip wrinkles in an imitation of a sneer. “- Naruto doesn’t brush his teeth very often. That leaves you.”

He certainly speaks with an air of authority, for someone who just admitted to needing tutelage. Lee knows, deep down, that there is something lacking in this explanation. Something Gaara isn’t saying. He’s laid out the basic building blocks of his reasoning but has failed to supply the mortar. And now he sits there, hands straying to the handle of his coffee mug, staring expectantly as if he’s just handed Lee the trowel and expects him to do the work. 

_Say yes,_ whispers a voice in the back of Lee’s mind, which sounds suspiciously like Tenten after about four beers. _What if this is your only chance?_

“Okay.” Lee swallows his heart from its place in his throat and waits for it to start beating again. “I’ll do it.”

  


* * *

  


They sit side-by-side on Lee’s settee--the location Lee feels will allow them the most room to maneuver and which, in his mind, has the least risk of breaking if he clenches his fist too hard, which is certainly a possibility. Gaara turns towards him, and their knees bump. 

“Okay,” Lee repeats, staring at his hands on his own thighs. “Kissing.”

He looks up and finds Gaara watching him, a faint flush across the bridge of his nose. He licks his lips, and the flash of pink from his tongue almost sends Lee running from the room in nerves. 

“Um,” Lee stammers, “first-” Until this moment, he never really thought through the _mechanics_ of the act. All of his previous kisses have been impulsive, spur-of-the-moment things, driven on by the drunken taunts of friends or the urges of his own reckless heart. Never before has he had the time to _plan_ how a kiss might unfold. 

And he wants to do a good job … to make it _good_. For himself as much as for Gaara. Because, if everything goes as planned--if Gaara kisses his date, if she falls for him--this will be the only chance he ever gets. He’ll have to survive off this bitter, stolen memory for the rest of his life.

He squares his shoulders. It’s a physical act, kissing--an interplay of two bodies against each other--an inciting motion that invites another motion, like a dance, or a spar. Perhaps that’s how he needs to think of it. Pretend that he’s teaching Gaara a particularly complex, two-person kata. His breathing relaxes minutely at the thought. This space is comfortable for him: pedagogy, physicality, routine and endurance. He seeks these familiar notions as he faces Gaara head-on, drawing his knees up under himself on the couch. 

“First,” Lee says, with authoritative confidence, “put your hands on her shoulders.” 

Gaara leans forward, bare feet trailing on the floor, and sets his hands gingerly on the balls of Lee’s shoulders. 

Lee hums. Not quite right. “No,” he says, and gently grips Gaara’s wrists, “closer.”

“Closer,” Gaara mimics, as Lee tugs his hands from his deltoids to rest on his trapezius muscles. His thumbs dangle precipitously close to Lee’s clavicle. If he were an enemy shinobi, he could shatter the bone with a gesture, cut off Lee’s breathing in an instant, with no more than a twitch of those thin, cool fingers. 

“Okay.” Lee clears his throat. “Now, it’s polite to ask someone’s permission before you kiss them.”

“Can I kiss you?” Gaara breathes. His voice is husky. Lee can see inside the parting of his mouth to the shine of his teeth, the dampness of the inside of his lips. 

Lee’s mind roils. He should say “no” and put a stop to this whole charade. He feels more than a little duplicitous. If he were a stronger man, he would confess his heart. He would tell Gaara that he wants him to forget his date, wants him to kiss Lee instead--kiss him for real, not under the auspices of practice. Lee doesn’t generally stand for lying, by omission or otherwise. He likes to think of himself as straightforward, honest to a fault. He’s no fan of ulterior motives. But the nervous twitching of Gaara’s fingers over his jumpsuit, the closeness of their limbs, makes a liar of him. 

“Yes,” Lee exhales, and the blush across Gaara’s nose deepens, pinpricks of pink heat spreading across his cheekbones to lap at his ears. 

Gaara swallows, and Lee can see the bob of his Adam’s apple beneath the bare skin of his throat, just above his jacket’s high collar. 

“Then she’s going to tilt her head,” Lee explains, demonstrating. His voice pitches down, “and you tilt yours in the opposite direction.”

Gaara’s head drops to the right. His pulse flutters visibly at the apex of his carotid artery, just below his jaw. 

“Now, just move forward,” Lee whispers. “And touch your lips to mine- _hers_.” 

There’s a breathy little exhale somewhere in-between, a half-sigh that Lee can’t rightly attribute to either one of them, and Gaara’s lips brush against his. His mouth is soft, impossibly so, and his lips are cool and gentle. Blood rushes in Lee’s ears and makes him lightheaded. They hang there, suspended for a moment, both utterly still, listening to the racing of their veins. 

Lee blinks his eyes open to find Gaara’s pupilless stare boring into his. He starts back with a yelp of surprise. 

“Close your eyes!” 

“Why?” Gaara’s hands tense on his shoulders, thumbs digging into the fleshy gap where the clavicular head of his pectoralis muscle meets his collarbone and holding him fast. “What if I want to look at you- _her_?”

Lee’s breath catches in his throat. “It’s- it’s just polite.” 

Gaara huffs a little breath of irritation, but then his eyes fall closed. 

“Better.”

“Is that all?” Gaara asks, eyes still shut. If Lee didn’t know better, he would swear Gaara sounds almost disappointed. 

“No,” Lee whispers, and Gaara’s lower lip retreats from its pout, mouth slackening. “That’s just the beginning.” 

Gaara shifts closer, just a hair’s breadth, and their knees jar against each other again. With his eyes closed like this, Lee can study him at his leisure. There’s a hint of sweat salting his temples, and the overhead light casts shadows from his eyelashes into the hollows of the dark circles under his eyes. Lee can smell the cream from his coffee and the sugar of his biscuits on his breath. 

Gaara looks up at him from under barely-parted lids, a flash of blue-green in a puddle of bruisey black and grey. 

“Close your eyes,” he mocks him, a hint of challenge in his voice. “It’s polite.”

Lee shuts his eyes hard with a wince. 

“Let’s try- “ He chokes on the words, starts again. “Let’s try moving your mouth, this time.” He cranes forward, hand groping blindly for the side of Gaara’s face, eyes still firmly shut. He cups his palm over Gaara’s ear, tangles his fingers into the coarseness of his hair, and brings their lips together again. 

With both their eyes closed, it takes a moment to seat their lips comfortably against one another’s. Their noses bump, and Gaara makes a little grunt of discomfort. But soon enough their lips settle into a smooth overlap. Gaara hums, and Lee feels it buzzing in his sternum. 

Lee presses gently against the side of Gaara’s face and shifts him, until their mouths are brushing. Lee slides their lips together, moving slow and easy. There’s a moment where Gaara doesn’t move at all, still as a corpse, but he catches the rhythm soon enough. Then his lips are pressing back, a mirror image of Lee’s own motions. The slick heat of it distracts Lee from the way Gaara’s breath goes tight, picking up until it’s racing in short pants and hisses, his chest brushing Lee’s when it rises. His hands tighten on Lee’s shoulders like the talons of the hawks in Suna’s aviary just before they take flight. Lee strokes his cheeks with both thumbs, smoothing his skin like he would gentle a bird’s feathers, until he relaxes, breathing deep and even in between the movements of their mouths. 

“You touched my face,” Gaara says absently, when they pull apart, as if Lee hadn’t been right there, doing it. “Why?”

“It’s just … a different- you don’t have to hold my shoulders the _whole_ time.”

“I want to try it.” His voice is petulant, like a child demanding a favorite toy. “It felt … nice.”

Lee’s lungs constrict like they’re filling up with blood from his now-unbeating heart.

“Okay,” he whispers, and Gaara slides the soft, cool skin of his palms across Lee’s cheeks.

Gaara hums just before his lips meet Lee’s, this time, and the sound skitters down Lee’s spine to dance in his gut, clicking there like the shining wings of cicadas freed from underground. His fingers coil in the hair that falls in front of Lee’s ears, then traverse up and down the sides of Lee’s face and jaw, like a blind man making a map of a new territory. He’s loud as he takes the lead, letting out breathy pants and soft murmurs and little _mmm_s of effort between every kiss that make Lee shiver. 

When Gaara pulls back, his eyes are shining. His nostrils flare with heavy breaths. He looks tremendously affected, pulse hammering visibly in his throat. His fingers still haven’t left Lee’s face, stroking the skin behind his ears and brushing the close-cropped edges of his bowl cut. 

“I like that,” Gaara says, voice tight and harsh, like the words are an immense effort to say, “better than the shoulders.” 

“There’s also- ” Lee falters, still struggling to catch his breath. The phrase is so indelicate. “- kissing with- with tongue. I’ve only done it once, so I don’t know if I’m very good at it, but we could try, if you like.”

The blush on Gaara’s cheeks has darkened to a florid red, an uneven, ruddy map of spreading heat. Behind the small, dark bulbs of his ear piercings, even his earlobes are blooming crimson. He nods, and his tongue darts out to wet his lips. 

“Just, um- just … do what I do, I guess.” Whatever teacher-like confidence Lee attempted to emulate before, it’s gone now. This is nothing like teaching a kata, after all. 

Gaara is the one to move forward, again, and his feet leave the floor as he crowds into Lee’s space. He gathers Lee close with hands on either side of his face, pulling their mouths together. The initial movements are easy now, practiced, a heady mix of comfortable and alluring. Gaara presses a series of soft kisses to Lee’s mouth with tiny smacks of wet noise at each parting. His fingers clench in the hair behind Lee’s ears and tug, insistent, steering Lee where he wants him to go. Lee shouldn’t be so surprised--Gaara is a genius, after all, and it’s not so remarkable that this, too, would come as easily to him as a jutsu. 

Gaara’s lips part against his, and Lee takes advantage of the moment to quest his tongue forward, just a gentle swipe along the inside of Gaara’s upper lip. Gaara gasps a breath, then copies the motion. The heat of his mouth is almost unbearable. Lee’s hands reach out blindly and find themselves on Gaara’s waist. Without thinking about it, he tugs Gaara forward, until he’s nearly sprawled across Lee’s lap. Lee’s tongue probes out again, and catches itself against the sharp point of one of Gaara’s canines. The brief, bright spot of pain-turned-pleasure lights Lee up inside, and he repeats the motion again and again. 

One of Gaara’s hands slips down his neck to the collar of his jumpsuit and fists there, holding Lee in place as he eases further into his lap. Lee’s hands slip around his waist and crawl up the small of his back. Gaara moves boldly, and the scrape of his tongue against Lee’s alveolar ridge sends a frisson of heat right through him. A soft, pliant little noise eases out of Gaara’s throat and into the space between them, sounding suspiciously like a moan. 

_This is moving too fast,_ Lee thinks, in a sudden flash of clarity. The thought shocks him like a live wire. 

He jerks back from Gaara, panting. 

Gaara’s face is splotchy with heat, his hair disheveled and his lips kiss-bitten pink. Slowly, his hand unclenches from Lee’s jumpsuit, and he sits back, smoothing the wrinkles he’s left there idly. His eyes are wide--the whites visible all the way around the glassy shine of his irises. He looks _wrecked_. 

Lee can only imagine he looks the same, or worse. He lets his hands fall from Gaara’s waist. His thumb picks at a loose stitch in the couch cushion. 

For a moment they just stare at one another, breathing in tandem. Then, Gaara clears his throat. 

“Thank you,” he says, voice rough-edged as sandstorm. “I feel … prepared.” 

Lee’s eyes well up, and Gaara’s thumb finds his tears, strokes them away from his lashes with a gentle sweep of thin fingers, eyes narrowing in concern. He clambers off Lee’s lap and stands next to him, weight shifting from foot to foot, uncertain. 

“Are you all right?” 

Lee nods, even though he isn’t. 

“I’m fine,” he lies. “I just burnt my tongue earlier.”

  


* * *

  


The hall that’s been rented out for the Daimyo’s birthday is as large as it is ostentatious. The tables are draped in great panels of soft gray silk that ripple like waterfalls as women swan past them, drowning in the satin of their gowns and choking on their necks full of pearls. Crystals hang from every light fixture, catching and refracting the golden light of the candles and the sunlight carding through the pale blue stained-glass windows in infinite, shimmering rainbows. 

Lee feels like an outsider, pressed up against the wall with his hands fisted behind his back. He’s wearing an ill-fitting rented three-piece suit over his mesh armor and a bowtie that feels like a garotte. He has no idea how he’s meant to provide security in wingtips that bite at his toes and squeak like traitorous mice, announcing his position wherever he goes. Tenten and Neji flank him on either side, Neji in an immaculately fitted pale gray tuxedo that complements his eyes, and Tenten in a too-tight sheath dress that she keeps tugging at the hips of. 

“I swear to god,” Tenten mutters irritably, “if I have to go running after someone, this thing is gonna split right up the side and the whole dance floor is going to see my drawers.”

“It would probably be the most exciting thing any of these folks have seen all year,” Neji snorts, shaking his head. “Besides, nothing’s going to happen. This is all for show.” He adopts an affected, snooty accent that doesn’t sound terribly different from his normal way of speaking. “Look how rich the River Daimyo is--he can afford shinobi guards all the way from _Konoha_.”

Lee disguises his laugh as a cough in his fist. 

A flash of red passes in his periphery, and Lee straightens like a rod was suddenly bolted to his spine. A few tables to their right, he sees him: Gaara, looking stiflingly uncomfortable in a high-collared, tailed jacket the same red as his neatly-parted hair. Hanging from his arm is the woman Lee can only assume is his date. She towers over him by at least six inches, though whether that’s owing to the wood-block heels favored by the ladies of the court or her own natural height, Lee can’t say. Her face is limescale-white with powder, her lips rouged and her eyebrows shaved and painted back in with harsh black. When she laughs, her head bobs on her long neck and her teeth chatter like one of Kankuro’s puppets. 

At least one of them seems to be having a good time, Lee thinks, as he watches her guffaw and elbow Gaara in the ribs. His wince is visible even from yards away, and Lee bites his lip. She’s lucky she didn’t try that just a few years ago, before Gaara honed his impeccable self control. His gourd is nowhere to be seen, a gesture of deference in the surrendering of arms at the doors of the banquet hall, but he’s no fool; that doesn’t mean he hasn’t secreted his defenses somewhere around his person. Lee suspects that if he checked Gaara’s pockets just now, he’d find no fewer than three distinct types of sand. And then of course there’s the sand armor, which leaves his skin shimmering faintly in the lights when he lifts his head to stare across the hall at Lee.

“Are you okay, Lee?” Tenten prods. “You’re bright red.”

Caught, Lee realizes he’s strangling himself with fingers tugging at his own collar. Panicked sweat sticks his hair to the nape of his neck.

“Fine,” he barks hoarsely. “I’m just going to go do a quick perimeter sweep. Reconnaissance. You two will be okay here?”

“We’ll be fine,” Tenten says in a tight voice. “But are you sure you are?”

“Right as rain,” Lee mumbles, but his stomach turns somersaults and threatens to flip up and out of his mouth. 

As he makes his hasty departure, he notices Neji nudge Tenten and gesture with his chin to the table to their right, where the Kazekage sits. 

There’s an interior balcony that rings the hall, a convenient vantage point for gossips and trained assassins alike, and it’s here that Lee finds himself, wedged between a decorative potted shrubbery and a bust of some ancient feudal lord. Below, the dance floor throngs with tightly clustered bodies, claustrophobic even at a distance. The perky notes of a string quartet dance up and cloak the chatter of the crowd below. Lee scans the floor, spotting Tenten and Neji, now inched shoulder-to-shoulder, pinkies joined, but he can no longer pick out the table at which Gaara and his date were seated. Perhaps they’ve already slipped the hall, perhaps right now, somewhere sight-unseen, Gaara is kissing her-

There’s a _crack_ as Lee’s fingers splinter the balcony railing. 

“Lee,” a familiar voice says from behind his shoulder. 

Lee wheels around. 

“Oh, Gaara,” he stutters. That explains why Lee couldn’t find him around the dance floor. He cuts a fine figure there, haloed in rainbow light shining up from the stairwell. His coat has been abandoned somewhere, but the dark brown vest he has on underneath emphasizes the narrowness of his waist, and draws the eye to the tiny gold buttons that climb the single breast of his shirt to its high collar. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, forearms flexed from his hands fisted in his pockets, and he’s breathing heavily, scowling, as if he’s just been running. “It’s good to see you! How is your date going?” 

“Loud,” Gaara replies. His eyes narrow, and he takes another two steps towards Lee. “Miserably. … Are you all right?”

“Why do people keep asking me that?” Lee babbles, a little hysterically. 

Gaara presses the backs of his fingers to Lee’s forehead. The coolness of the sand is soothing on Lee’s fevered brow. He wishes Gaara would cup his jaw again, stroke his cheekbone with his thumb. “Because you look like you’re about to be sick.” 

Lee hiccups, half a giggle, half a sob. He’s not altogether wrong about that. 

“Lee,” Gaara urges him, and now his fingers are at his throat, checking his pulse, “what is going on?” If only those fingers would crook downwards, hook in the collar of his shirt again, pull him in for another kiss-

“Gaara!” Lee blurts, heart battering his ribs in a rapid tattoo. “I have something to tell you!” 

Gaara glances over his shoulder, scanning the balcony behind them, then wedges himself in between the bust and the planter with Lee. He’s much too close now, bracing himself with his hands on Lee’s shoulders. It’s all far too terribly familiar. A bubble of panic rises in Lee’s throat. 

“Okay,” Gaara whispers. “What is it?” 

“I- “ Lee starts, then chokes. His bowtie is strangling him, and he tugs at it with numb fingers until it hangs loose around his neck.

“Lee,” Gaara urges. “You’re worrying me.” The emotion is writ large across Gaara’s face--at least, large from Lee’s perspective, which is to say, miniscule and unnoticeable for almost anyone else. 

“I’ve failed you as a friend,” Lee heaves out, all in a single breath. “I betrayed your trust.”

“What are you talking about?” Gaara hisses. His fingers are shifting in Lee’s hair now, tousling it out of its slicked-back pomade. “That doesn’t sound like you. Was there some sort of jutsu- ?”

“Two weeks ago!” Lee cries in a hushed voice. His hands find Gaara’s shoulders and shake them, pleading with him to understand. “At my apartment. When we … “ His voice drops to a frantic whisper. “... kissed.”

Gaara nods, now, the crease between his brows deepening. 

“I did not approach you with pure intentions,” Lee continues. Like the forming of a chink that cracks the wall of a dam, everything that has built up comes rushing out. His eyes clench around tears as the words flow from his mouth, uncontrollable as a deluge. “I didn’t- I wanted _more_ than to help you. I was- I was selfish. I didn’t speak the truth of my heart, because I knew that, if I had been honest, you wouldn’t have wanted to- … not with me, I mean. I should have said something, but I didn’t, and I- I _don’t want you to kiss her_.” Tears are coursing freely down his face now. “I want you to kiss- “ His voice cracks, now, cratering down into a whisper. “- _me_.”

When he finally opens his eyes, gargling back a sob, Gaara is staring at him, face blank and unreadable. His eyes are round as the full moon, but his mouth is as flat and emotionless as a barren desert plateau. His fingers are still tangled in Lee’s hair. 

“I am so, so sorry,” Lee whimpers. “I understand if we cannot be friends any longer.”

Gaara’s spread fingers smash against his wobbling lips. 

“Hush,” Gaara mutters, mouth terse. His eyes dart back and forth across Lee’s face, searching. “I thought I was reading too much into it.” He scrubs at Lee’s face with the sleeve of his jacket, suddenly, rubbing at the tear tracks. Lee just blinks wetly at him, too startled to respond. “I thought you might- “ Gaara shakes his head, a rough, abrupt gesture. “But then you started _crying_, and I thought you _regretted_ it- “

“Never!” Lee interrupts, garbled around Gaara’s fingers, tasting the chemical sting of his own hair gel. “I could never- _Gaara,_, I- I- “ It’s far too soon to say the words that are hammering at the back of his throat. “I wanted you to mean it.”

“I did.” Gaara’s voice sounds like it’s been abraded by the sand that shifts, now, away from his face, cracking and trailing down into the pockets of his waistcoat, exposing the fervid, carmine darkening of his cheeks. His fingers fall from Lee’s face and grasp at his upper arms. 

“Then why did you- ?”

“I don’t know!” he snarls. Gaara’s breath is coming fast, now, harsh pants that partner in timing with the clenching of his fingers on Lee’s shoulders. “Because I’m- emotionally constipated, that’s what Kankuro always says. Because I- because I don’t know how to _ask_ for what I want, only order it, and I would never want to demand that from you. Because I thought that if you just _saw_ how I felt, then you would understand …” His fingers tighten. There will be welts in the pattern of mesh armor on Lee’s skin come morning. “You’ve always been more in tune with your emotions than I have. You’ve got better instincts, more- more literacy with this sort of thing. You can read me like a book, I thought you’d- “ 

His chest is heaving when he breaks off, his cheeks blotchy and expression half-rancorous. Lee wants to kiss him so, so badly.

“This … this solves a number of problems, actually,” Gaara concludes, with a rushed exhalation, like he’s just laid the burden of the world at Lee’s feet. 

Lee didn’t notice it while Gaara was ranting, but his own hands have found their way to Gaara’s waist, and he trails them up, now, up past Gaara’s elbows and the strained muscle of his biceps and his shuddering, trembling shoulders to cup either side of his face. 

“So, can we try again?” Lee asks. “For real, this time?”

Gaara doesn’t respond with words; he just tugs Lee into him and closes his eyes.


End file.
